It's simple - stop all flights landing in Ireland from Italy. Immediately. This is intended as  neither insult nor disrespect to our Italian friends and European neighbours. However, there is unfortunately a hotbed of COVID-19 infection in Italy at the moment, and it is baffling to me as an Irish doctor in Dublin - imminently facing into a potentially tumultuous threat to me, my colleagues, my family, and the Irish people at large, that we have yet to stop the flights landing from this blatant source of COVID-19 spread.

As an island, we were ideally positioned to minimise the entry of COVID-19 into the country. And yet our government has been weak, reactionary and inept. It seems to me that we are waiting for Europe to tell us what to do. I am not ashamed to admit that I am not an expert in infectious diseases, nor that I am afraid of the threat that seems to be simmering and on the brink of eruption in our hospitals. It seems logical and extremely straight forward to me that the flights from Italy should be stopped to try to stem the tide and give us a chance to avoid being overwhelmed like China, Korea, Italy and other countries (which, by the way, have far larger health systems and ICU capacities than us).

We can live without the skiing slopes for a year, lads. Stop the flights and prevent a burgeoning crisis for the Irish people.